TODAY IN MISSION YEARBOOK
Mission Yearbook: Pastor explores preaching with a sacramental imagination
The Rev. Dr. Dave Davis recently gave preachers in and around the Synod of the Covenant plenty to think about through a webinar that helped participants weave the sacraments more fully into their sermons.
Davis, pastor of Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, offered his “Preaching from Font to Table” talk as part of the synod’s monthly preaching webinars. His talk is available here.
Davis has been teaching this material as an elective at Princeton Theological Seminary for a couple of years. “This is a conversation about preaching on the occasion of the celebration of one of the sacraments,” Davis said, “and also how a deeper understanding of the sacraments can provide imagery and a theology for our sermons, a more robust relationship of Word and sacrament.”
When he asks seminary students to come up with a quality sermon they’re heard or are aware of on either of the sacraments, they sometimes have difficulty, Davis said, adding, “I’d like to invite you to join me today in reflecting on your own preaching life in respect to the sacraments.”
Dr. Nora Tubbs Tisdale, who taught Davis and many other preachers, argues in “Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art” that pastors ought to be exegeting congregational life as well as biblical texts. “She suggests early on in that book that one can observe sacramental furniture as a reflection of the church’s relationship to the sacraments, especially when the sacraments are not being celebrated” on a given Sunday as part of worship, Davis said.
Davis grew up in a church where worship leaders pushed the communion table “against a far wall in the chancel” on Sundays when the Lord’s Supper was not being celebrated. But other faith communities take a more visible approach. Davis visited Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church outside Annapolis, Maryland, where he was shown a prominent baptismal font bolted to the floor, rendering it unmovable for any event.
Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, features a large window with a view of a wadi that fills with water when it rains. The water then “goes right into their baptismal font. It’s a very powerful image,” Davis said. Church leaders told Davis the font has a leak that can’t be fixed, “and so baptismal water was always leaking into the nave of the sanctuary, which I think is a cool image to work with,” he said.
He noted that author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor calls preachers “detectives of divinity,” and Notre Dame theologian Mary Catherine Hilkert in her book “Naming Grace” identifies the preacher’s task as helping “the listener see what Christians know: that the whole world and life itself is charged with the very grandeur of God,” Davis said. “What we are called to do with our sermons is help people see the world as God intends, bearing the very grandeur of God.”
Preaching is a corporate act, and Dietrich Boenhoeffer put the preacher’s task like this in his “Worldly Preaching”: “I preach because the church is there, and I preach that the church might be there. Church preaches to church.”
Davis sometimes uses the phrase “bringing the world to bear on unsuspecting biblical texts” when preachers employ the lectionary to aid their preaching. With that approach, “it’s amazing how contextual your preaching can become and how relevant the living Word becomes,” Davis said. The sacraments can also be brought to bear on unsuspecting biblical texts as “a way to unleash understandings of scripture in new ways and make it relevant on the occasion of baptism and eucharist,” he said.
“I don’t want you to think I’m perfect at this,” Davis said. “I went back and looked at some of my sermons in preparation for today, and I was doing exactly what I am now calling out.”
Davis mentioned BEM, the Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry document the World Council of Churches first published in 1982 and reprinted many times after that. BEM gives “the clearest outline of the theological fenceposts of each of the sacraments,” Davis said, employing a term favored by his professor, Dr. James Kay. “That’s how I understand these various ways of approaching the Lord’s Supper.”
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Dayna Oliver, Grant Management Office, Presbyterian Life & Witness
Jacklyn Walker, Administrative Project Manager, Center for Repair, Presbyterian Life & Witness
Let us pray:
God of the old and the new, the great and the small, thank you for the warmth of your love and the inspiration of your Spirit. May you continue to bring new life into your churches, that we might proclaim in a myriad of ways the wonders of your love. In Jesus’ name. Amen.